In any case, we know from other sites that downvotes increase the probability of getting more downvotes, and nasty comments increase the probability of getting more nasty comments. The same goes for upvotes and positive comments. It’s just social dynamics. Some subs on reddit existed almost exclusively to call out other subs, but I think that Lemmy’s user base is small and spread out enough that it’s not a major contributing factor in voting.

I think it’s mostly just people scrolling along, running across a hot take, and interpreting it according to the voting.

In any case, I would suspect that people would be more impacted by hurtful comments than downvotes.

[–] spujb@lemmy.cafe 14 points 6 months ago

nope. brigading happens on lemmy, and is visible in the modlogs with decent frequency. same goes for vote manipulation. i take no pleasure from this fact; that’s just the way it is.

obviously comments have more weight than votes in general. that doesn’t give you an excuse to be judgmental of how people interact with the site, just be careful.

also it’s not just downvotes that can be demoralizing. in early months of the reddit migration i witnessed blatantly and violently homophobic shit get upvoted sky high before mods stepped in. made me really feel gross and uncomfortable about the platform altogether.

generally, a tip, don’t lay question to other peoples’ expression of lived experience without evidence—especially when it doesn’t affect you at all.

[–] princessnorah@lemmy.blahaj.zone 8 points 6 months ago

Trans people on reddit would often get downvoted to oblivion for seemingly no reason. It happened to me on occasion, with comments that were otherwise benign, non-controversial and at least tangentially on-topic. Like fair enough if they stayed at 1 but these would be at -5 or lower. And always on posts in default/major subreddits too. This stuff was done systematically to silence trans users by having their comments hidden from low vote total. Because actually posting hateful comments would just get reported and removed in those large spaces, and this goes undetected.

Now imagine a trans Instance like Blahaj, dealing with the potential of a new instance showing up just to downvote members, and that happening, over and over. No comments, just downvotes. That's why Blahaj has them disabled.